I've been playing various online games (Diablo 3, TF2, SC2, etc.) and I've found that I've been receiving massive lag spikes, often making the game unplayable. At first I attributed this to the other people in my house watching Youtube and generally hogging bandwidth, however I found today that even when nobody else is online that I'm still getting massive lag in my games. I already had this problem once before, I talked to my cable company about it and they swapped out our old modem/router for a brand new one (same model) and it apparently didn't do the trick. The thing is, this is just after an upgrade to a higher tier of service that my ISP offers, and before said upgrade, I wasn't experiencing any problems at all, I wouldn't even notice if anyone was using Youtube or anything.

I want a tool that is unobtrusive enough to let me play my games on a Mid 2010 MBP 15", and yet can monitor and record bandwidth and latency so that I have something that I can (hopefully) directly show my cable company and tell them that this isn't the quality of service that we're paying for (and I highly doubt that it's not our network, because these issues are persisting across all of the games I play). Any suggestions, preferably free, are highly appreciated.

You can also run tools like speedtest.net which show how much bandwidth your connection has and latency (to their servers). Run this periodically at certain time intervals and save the results. Your ISP may also have it's own tool to measure this (comcast does).

The other thing you can do on your end is run a network monitoring tool that, depending on how you set it up, can measure latency times to certain sites at certain times of day.

The problem with any of this is 2-fold. 1) you can only run things on your systems/network, and a lot of the problems may be the networks or sites of the games servers, your ISPs, other sites, or intermediate networks that the traffic is flowing on, so you can't directly find it, and your ISP has no control over it if it's not on their network. 2) Read your contract with your ISP carefully - changes are your ISP does not promise you any given service level, instead saying something that boils down to "best effort". So they may not even want to help.

Still, try monitoring your latency/ping times and report the numbers to your ISP, see if you'll get someone who can help.

Open "run" then type "cmd" (it's command prompt). Once opened type ping "www.siteofyoutchoosing.com" (without the ") and hit enter. Then it should display on going measurements and final results. As i said it will tell you if you lose packets or if you have huge ping.

Last edited by Arclight on Thu Jun 14, 2012 3:30 am, edited 1 time in total.

nVidia video drivers FAIL, click for more infoDisclaimer: All answers and suggestions are provided by an enthusiastic amateur and are therefore without warranty either explicit or implicit. Basically you use my suggestions at your own risk.

Open "run" then type "cmd" (it's command prompt). Once opened type "ping http://www.siteofyoutchoosing.com" (without the ") and hit enter. Then it should display on going measurements and final results. As i said it will tell you if you lose packets or if you have huge ping.

Open "run" then type "cmd" (it's command prompt). Once opened type "ping http://www.siteofyoutchoosing.com" (without the ") and hit enter. Then it should display on going measurements and final results. As i said it will tell you if you lose packets or if you have huge ping.

I'm on a Macbook Pro, as I said in my original post

Oh my bad, i didn't noticed i have treded on hollowed ground. WTF am i doing in the Apple Sanctuary?

nVidia video drivers FAIL, click for more infoDisclaimer: All answers and suggestions are provided by an enthusiastic amateur and are therefore without warranty either explicit or implicit. Basically you use my suggestions at your own risk.

Open "run" then type "cmd" (it's command prompt). Once opened type "ping http://www.siteofyoutchoosing.com" (without the ") and hit enter. Then it should display on going measurements and final results. As i said it will tell you if you lose packets or if you have huge ping.

I don't have a mac in front of me to play with to give the exact syntax and reading the man page makes my head hurt. I don't know if the default behavior is to ping X amount of times or to continually ping until you CTRL-C or CTRL-X or CTRL-BREAK or whatever Unix uses to send an interrupt like that. In Windows, after you CTRL-C it will give statistics for the entire time of pinging but unsure with OS X.

Open "run" then type "cmd" (it's command prompt). Once opened type ping "www.siteofyoutchoosing.com" (without the ") and hit enter. Then it should display on going measurements and final results. As i said it will tell you if you lose packets or if you have huge ping.

And I know this is Appleland, but for anyone use wanting to do this on Windows, you can run "ping -?" to get the help. By default, windows ping will only go 4 times and call it done. For a better way, do it continuously:

This is also a decent way to see if your dns is workin', too. If your computer claims you have 'net connectivity and you can't ping www.google.com because it can't find the host but you CAN ping known good IP addresses on the 'net, that helps you narrow it down. I know there's nslookup on windows and unix but I've never really bothered to learn that.

i have been have the same problems with my game as well, i have tried a multitude of things including, scanning for viruses, and resetting my internet, but none seemed to work if, you find a solution keep me posted.